www.suck.com Filler 4.20.00
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It's a rare event when history makes interesting news, and so the New York Times' resurrection http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-cia-index.html of the 1953 coup in Iran comes highly recommended. The outlines of the plot — in which US and UK spooks, along with a Roosevelt and the father of friendly fire aficionado Norman Schwarzkopf, did the dirty against a legitimate government in order to beef up the homicidal Shah — have been known almost since the time of the coup. In fact, one of the story's most entertaining passages concerns how the 1953-era Times repeated accurate Soviet reports of the Yankee plot without bothering to follow them up — the Grey Lady's version of damning the truth with faint reporting. But the new story arrives documented by a "secret history" written by Donald Wilber, one of those Gentleman Spies who dashingly spent half a century spreading American-made misery to even the most remote corners of the earth. (One funny image has Wilber decked out in the classic Sand Wigger regalia — kaffiyeh and robe — that these T.E. Lawrence-style heroes used to wear to show they were down with the people whose lives they were destroying). Among the history's best scoops: Wilber's knowing reference to "the recognized incapacity of Iranians to plan or act in a thoroughly logical manner." Edward Said has suggested that Americans have absolved themselves of the responsibility of taking middle eastern cultures seriously by defining the cultures themselves as mental illnesses. For anybody old enough to remember how those crazy Iranians had it in for us in the eighties for no apparent reason, the Wilber history may prove enlightening. And since we're always being accused of not liking anything, there's a recommendation for you: Go read the story, and then exercise your constitutional right to burn the flag.
courtesy of theSucksters